AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner / Question #1220 of 719

Question #1220

A company needs to categorize its cloud expenditures by environment (e.g., production, staging) and team for granular cost tracking.

Which AWS feature or service should the company utilize?

A

AWS Budgets

B

Cost allocation tags

C

AWS Organizations

D

AWS Cost Explorer

Explanation

The correct answer is B. Cost allocation tags.

Why B is correct:
Cost allocation tags are metadata labels applied to AWS resources (e.g., EC2 instances, S3 buckets) to categorize costs. By tagging resources with keys like 'Environment' (e.g., production, staging) and 'Team' (e.g., engineering, marketing), the company can generate cost reports filtered by these tags in services like AWS Cost Explorer or the AWS Cost & Usage Report. This provides granular visibility into spending per environment and team.

Why other options are incorrect:
- A. AWS Budgets: Sets spending alerts and tracks budgets but does not categorize costs.
- C. AWS Organizations: Manages multiple AWS accounts but does not inherently categorize costs by environment/team unless combined with tags.
- D. AWS Cost Explorer: Analyzes and visualizes costs but relies on existing categorization (e.g., tags) to group data.

Key Points:
- Use cost allocation tags to label resources for cost categorization.
- Tags must be activated in the AWS Billing console to appear in cost reports.
- Tags enable filtering in AWS Cost Explorer, Budgets, and other cost management tools.

Answer

The correct answer is: B